Comparison of the Main Online Personality Tests

1. 16Personalities

The 16Personalities test should not be confused with Cattell’s “16PF Questionnaire,” the 16Personalities website offers a test that is a Jung-inspired variant on the 16-factor theme, namely, 16 basic personality types, as opposed to traits.

Each personality type is constructed—on the basis of the test-taker’s answers—out of eight fundamental traits organized into four dichotomous pairs, forming opposite poles of a spectrum.

The four dichotomous pairs or spectra (in italics) are as follows. For convenience, each trait is symbolized by a capital letter and each combined pair is labeled with a name for explanatory purposes only.

1. Extraversion (E) – Introversion (I) (Energy)
2. Sensing (S) – Intuition (N) (Mind)
3. Thinking (T) – Feeling (F) (Nature)
4. Judging (J) – Perceiving (P) (Tactics)

In the output provided for the test-taker, scores are expressed as percentages situated along each of the four spectra.

This overall scheme gives rise to 16 permutations, each of which corresponds to a personality type. These 16 combinations—along with the corresponding type-names in parentheses—are the following:

1. ENTJ (Commander)
2. ENTP (Debater)
3. ENFJ (Protagonist)
4. ENFP (Campaigner)
5. ESTJ (Executive)
6. ESTP (Entrepreneur)
7. ESFJ (Consul)
8. ESFP (Entertainer)
9. INTJ (Architect)
10. INTP (Logician)
11. INFJ (Advocate)
12. INFP (Mediator)
13. ISTJ (Logistician)
14. ISTP (Virtuoso)
15. ISFJ (Defender)
16. ISFP (Artist)

For example, this reviewer’s scores corresponded to the combination, “Introverted – Intuitive – Thinking -– Judging,” or INTJ. Thus, I am officially labelled an “Architect” within the 16Personalities framework.

As a final flourish, each personality type is accorded a fifth trait, the dichotomous pair “Assertiveness (A) – Turbulence (T).” But this trait is presented as a mere variant on the basic type, being reported with a hyphen to distinguish it from the other four trait-pair combinations that constitute the 16 personality types.

For example, I am officially an “INTJ-T.” But, according to the 16Personalities system, I remain an “Architect,” all the same.

As far as the mechanics of taking the 16Personalities test are concerned, the version of the test that I took was free of charge. It was relatively short, as such tests go, requiring about 20 minutes to complete. That is undoubtedly a plus.

On the other hand, the printed output reporting the results of the test is correspondingly brief, which is perhaps more of a negative.

While the printout is skimpy, the online explanatory material accompanying the test is well-organized and attractively presented. In general, the site and the test are notably user-friendly, without sacrificing a tone of professionalism.

The major disadvantage of this site is that its orientation is primarily on the individual, with little explicit reference the work environment.

However, within this constraint, the results seemed to this reviewer to be quite accurate. That is, I must admit that the personality type “INTJ-T” appears to fit me to a T.

2. DiSC

In its present form, the acronym DiSC officially stands for the traits, “Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Conscientiousness.”

The original set of traits, however, was “Dominance, Inducement, Submission, and Compliance.” The contemporary form of the traits appears to be basically a more-upbeat, “nicer” version for our more-sensitive times.

The DiSC test has its distant roots in a popular work entitled Emotions of Normal People, published in 1928 by the American psychologist and prolific author William Moulton Marston (1893–1947).

Writing in the wake of Carl Jung’s introduction of the concept of “psychological types” (see above), Marston developed an original four-factor theory of personality in the course of a broader discussion of normal (as opposed to abnormal) human behavior aimed at a wide audience.

Even though he held a PhD from Harvard University, Marston did not pursue a conventional academic career. Rather, he was an inventor (one of the early developers of lie detection), a comic book author (the inventor of Wonder Woman), and what we might now call a “commentator,” “pundit,” or “public intellectual.”

In this latter role, one of Marston’s primary motives in writing Emotions of Normal People was to provide a “scientific” justification for the sexual revolution of the “Roaring 20s.” His development of a four-factor personality theory in that book was essentially a byproduct of his desire to broaden the public’s mind, as he saw it, in sexual matters. (This may be why Marston is a relatively obscure figure today, in comparison with more conventional academic psychologists like Eysenck and Cattell.)

Marston’s personality model languished until the 1960s, when it was taken up by the American industrial psychologist Walter V. Clarke (1902–1972), who used it as the basis for his own work, which was focused on the concept of “self-description” as a basis for personality tests.

Clarke published this work, in collaboration with Peter F. Merenda (1922–2019), in 1965 in the article “Self description and personality measurement” (Journal of Clinical Psychology, 21: 52–56).

During the 1970s, Clarke’s work was further developed by the American psychologist John G. Geier, Jr. (1934–2009), in collaboration with Dorothy E. Downey, in the form of the first widely disseminated DiSC-based personality assessment, known as the “Personal Profile System.”

The team summarized their findings in a later text, Personality Analysis, published in 1989, as well as in several later works.

Marston’s model was intended to explain people’s emotional responses and their influence on their environment. The theory posits that these behaviors are in response to one’s perception of self in relation to the environment.

In the contemporary version, the four traits (given in italics) are as follows. Glosses are included afterwards in parentheses for explanatory purposes.

1. Dominance (Assertiveness, Controlling behavior)
2. Influence (Communicative, Persuasive behavior)
3. Steadiness (Patience, Loyalty)
4. Conscientiousness (Accuracy, Attention to detail)

The DiSC test costs about $80.00. It requires about 20 minutes to complete. The output that is generated (Adobe Acrobat is required) is a handsome, 20-odd page booklet.

The accuracy of the DiSC test is similar to that of the 16Pesonalities test. That is to say, this reviewer felt that the results fit him like a glove.

This test has three unique features:

• Each question supplies a list of four traits and the test-taker picks the TWO traits from each list that he perceives as having the most and the least application to himself, respectively.
• Each of the four main traits is subdivided into 28 subcategories organized according to a scale of “intensity.” In this way, DiSC is able to make fine discriminations within each of the four main trait categories.
• The 28 subclasses are then collected into seven groupings for the purpose of giving each test-taker an “Intensity profile.”

For example, this reviewer scored as follows: D – 27; i – 2; S – 2; C – 25.

Since 27 and 25 are in the seventh (and highest) category, while 2 is in the first, or lowest, category, this particular score distribution translates into an intensity profile “score” of 7117.

In other words, this presentation of the test results shows that I am in the highest categories for D and C and the lowest categories for i and S.

I found this way of displaying my results to be very helpful. The accompanying discursive material explaining the significance of all of this was also of very high caliber.

All in all, I found DiSC to be an excellent test.

3. UnderstandingMyself

The product offered by the UnderstandingMyself.com website—which was founded by the well-known Canadian psychologist and public intellectual, Jordan Peterson (b. 1962)—is another test based on the five-factor model. Thus, it, too, traces its roots back to the Big-Five model developed by Tupes, Christal, Goldberg, Costa, McCrae, and others, as outlined above.

The version of the Big-Five model underlying this test appears to be fairly standard. The traits posited are presented in italics, while the accompanying glosses are provided in parentheses for explanatory purposes.

1. Openness (Intellect, Aesthetics)
2. Conscientiousness (Industriousness, Orderliness)
3. Extraversion (Enthusiasm, Assertiveness)
4. Agreeableness (Compassion, Politeness)
5. Neuroticism (Withdrawal, Volatility)

The gloss on the first trait, Openness—namely, “Intellect” and “Aesthetics”—is the most original aspect of the UnderstandingMyself version of the Big-Five test.

Peterson’s main contribution appears to be the highly fluent and user-friendly explanatory material available on this website, which succeeds in walking a fine line between accessibility and a professional tone.

The test is quite inexpensive—only $10. It took this reviewer about 25 minutes to complete.

The test is a set of sentences or phrases, for each of which the test-taker is asked to select a reaction along a scale extending from “Strongly Agree,” at one end, to “Strongly Disagree,” at the other.

The self-descriptions are relevant and interesting, covering a wide range of emotional traits and states. I also found the results to be quite insightful.

All in all, the accuracy of this test seemed to me outstanding.

4. Riso-Hudson Enneagram Type Indicator (RHETI)

The Riso-Hudson Enneagram Type Indicator (RHETI) has a fascinating, if occasionally murky, history.

The geometrical figure known as the “Enneagram” is an enneagon—an irregular, nine-cornered polygon—inscribed in a circle. The name derives from the Greek word ennea, meaning “nine.”

It is often claimed that the Enneagram figure possessed symbolic significance for the ancient Greek Pythagoreans, among other antique cultures. However, one must distinguish between interest in the number nine itself, within a wide variety of ancient numerological systems, on the one hand, and use of the Enneagram figure as a specific symbol, on the other.

The first clearly attested use of the latter occurs in the work of the traveler, author, mystic , and spiritual teacher, G.I. Gurdjieff (c. 1867–1949).

Gurdjieff was born in the Transcauscasian region of the Russian Empire, in the city of Alexandropol (now Gyumri) in what is today northern Armenia, on the border with Turkey to the west and not far from Georgia to the north.

Though Gurdjieff’s surname was Russianized (and its transliteration into European Latin-based writing systems Gallicized), he was apparently of mixed Greek and Armenian ancestry. He spoke four or five languages growing up, including Russian, Pontic Greek, Armenian, and Turkish.

Gurdjieff claimed to have encountered the Enneagram figure during his early travels in Central Asia and the Middle East. These travels are recounted in his magnum opus, Meetings with Remarkable Men, composed in Russian beginning in 1927 and first published in English in 1963.

However, it must be stressed that, although Gurdjieff became the conduit by means of which the Enneagram figure came to the attention of Western thinkers, he did so in the context of the figure’s esoteric symbolic meaning within his own distinctive version of the “perennial philosophy,” and not within the context of personality psychology.

The next person to take up the Enneagram figure in a systematic way was the Bolivian-born philosopher Oscar Ichazo (1931–2020). In his youth, Ichazo moved to Chile, where he spent the bulk of his career.

In 1956, Ichazo began to organize meetings with other South American intellectuals, with the purpose of studying the application of insights drawn from the perennial philosophy to psychoanalysis. Among the symbols and images that Ichazo discovered in his research was the Enneagram figure.

In 1968, Ichazo delivered a series of public lectures on his theory of human personality, which he had dubbed “Protoanalysis.” These lectures, which were held under the auspices of Ichazo’s Institute of Applied Psychology in Santiago, Chile, were probably the first substantial public presentation of the “Enneagram of personality”—i.e., the application of the symbology of the Enneagram figure to personality psychology.

Also in 1968, Ichazo founded the Arica School in Arica, a city located near the northernmost point of Chile, near the border with Peru.

Ichazo was highly prolific, authoring dozens of books on Protoanalysis, in general, and on the meaning of the Enneagram, in particular. A notable example is Between Metaphysics and Protoanalysis: A Theory for Analyzing the Human Psyche (1982).

Another version of the Enneagram system was developed by a former student of Ichazo’s, Claudio Naranjo (1932–2019), a Chilean psychiatrist. Naranjo originally trained in California under the German-born Gestalt psychiatrist Fritz Perls (1893–1970).

Back home in Chile in the 1970s, Naranjo made the acquaintance of Ichazo, with whom he studied informally. Eventually, he became disillusioned with Ichazo’s approach, broke away, and founded his own separate, Enneagram-based organization called the Seekers After Truth (SAT) Institute.

Naranjo was also a prolific author. A good example of his work is Ennea-type Structures: Self-Analysis for the Seeker, published in 1990. Naranjo’s version of Enneagram theory was influenced by the teaching of Sufism—from which he borrowed the phrase “seeker after truth”—as well as other Eastern religious traditions.

The last major phase in the development of Enneagram theory involved the American former-seminarian and spiritual seeker, Don Richard Riso (1946–2012).

After obtaining a master’s degree in philosophy from Stanford University, Riso switched paths and entered a Jesuit seminary in New Orleans, his hometown, to study for the priesthood. Later, he studied at another Jesuit seminary in Toronto, but was never ordained.

At Toronto, Riso came into contact with Thomas A. “Tad” Dunne (1926–2006), a Jesuit priest who had already developed an interest in the Enneagram of personality. Under Dunne’s influence, Riso decided to dedicate his life to understanding the human personality through the lens of Enneagram theory.

In 1975, Riso left the seminary for good. He has said that he spent the next decade working in Harvard University’s Widener Library on a daily basis, researching the Enneagram and other personality theories, including those of Carl Jung, Karen Horney (1885–1952), and others.

Finally, in 1987, Riso published the first of his many books, Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery.

In 1991, Riso paired up with the professional writer, Russ Hudson (b. 1977). Together, Riso and Hudson developed their own distinctive approach to the Enneagram, published tests based on their theory, and wrote numerous books, notably, The Wisdom of the Enneagram (1999).

Riso and Hudson jointly founded the Enneagram Institute in 1995.

The official test offered by the Enneagram Institute is known as the Riso-Hudson Enneagram Type Indicator, or “RHETI,” for short.

This reviewer took the RHETI on the Enneagram Institute website. It cost $20 and took me about half an hour to complete. Like the other tests I took, this one too did a good job of describing me.

The basic structure of the RHETI is similar to that of other tests: it presents the test-taker with 144 pairs of sentence self-descriptions. The user selects the sentence of each pair which he feels describes him best.

However, RHETI is an outlier in several ways:

First, based as it is on the Enneagram, RHETI naturally posits nine categories. Thus, it generates a profile as output that has more dimensions than do Big Five–based tests. Each of the nine categories represents a “type,” not a “trait.”

The nine types are the following:

1. Reformer
2. Helper
3. Achiever
4. Individualist
5. Investigator
6. Loyalist
7. Enthusiast
8. Challenger
9. Peacemaker

Second, the tone of the discussion of the nine types in the printed output and on the website is interestingly different. Namely, it is more clinical and more willing to indicate the negative potential of each type. This contrasts with the relentlessly upbeat tone adopted by most such tests.

Finally, the output material is not self-interpreting. For example, there is discussion of nine “levels” for each personality type, but no explanation of “levels” in the output provided. Thus, the user who wants a good understanding of his results is required to pay for additional materials available on the website.

Some may find these characteristics to be negative, though that will perhaps be a matter of taste. With respect to the second point, this reviewer found the relatively critical and professional tone of RHETI to be refreshing.

Another aspect of the output, which many may consider to be positive, is the fact that only the top three types are discussed in depth.

For example, while my printed report provided me with a “score,” or percentage, for all nine types, it emphasized the fact that my top three types are 1, 5, and 4—thus, my composite personality type is “Reformer-Investigator-Individualist.”

By ignoring the other six scores, the report is able to paint a much clearer portrait of one’s personality profile, with little or no loss.

5. Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

The creator of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), Katharine Cook Briggs (1875–1968), is a remarkable figure.

The young Briggs—let us call her Katharine—had no formal education, but was homeschooled to the age of 14 by her father, John Albert Cook (1842–1916), a professor of mathematics, economics, and entomology at Michigan Agricultural College (now Michigan State University) in Lansing, Michigan, where Katharine was born.

Katharine’s mother was a graduate of Oberlin College, which was highly unusual for the time.

Katharine herself obtained a bachelor’s degree in agriculture in 1893, at the age of 18, from her father’s institution.

In 1896, Katharine married a fellow student whom she had met at Michigan Agricultural College a few years earlier. Her husband was Lyman James Briggs (1874–1963), a physicist who became Director of the Bureau of Standards in Washington, DC, where the couple settled.

Briggs—as we may now call her—did not work outside the home, but in addition to homemaking led a quite active intellectual life.

In 1897, Briggs gave birth to Isabel Briggs Myers (1897–1980), who would grow up to become the driving force behind the MBTI. Briggs later gave birth to a baby boy who did not survive infancy.

Like her father before her, Briggs homeschooled Isabel. For this reason, among others, she began to take a keen interest in educational theory, including theories of child development and of the human personality.

In 1917, unsatisfied with what the psychologists of her day had to offer—as well as in response to her curiosity about the seemingly profound character differences between Isabel and her fiancé, Clarence Gates Myers (1894–1984)—Briggs began working on her own theory of personality.

Briggs’s theory was basically a four-factor theory that contained the nucleus of the theoretical structure of the future MBTI. The factors were (1) manner of obtaining energy, (2) mode of perception, (3) mode of judgment, and (4) orientation toward others.

Briggs wrote a couple of popular essays based on her early ideas, but eventually laid the work aside in favor of fiction writing.

The next important landmark in the history of the MBTI occurred in 1923, the year that Carl Jung’s book Psychological Types (see above) was translated into English. Briggs became fascinated by Jung’s ideas and shared her enthusiasm with Isabel, who was now old enough to take an active interest in her mother’s ideas.

Isabel would eventually take a degree in political science from Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, in the southwestern suburbs of Philadelphia. It was there that she met Clarence Myers, who became a lawyer. The couple were married in 1918.

Like her mother, Isabel—let us now call her Myers—became a professional novelist. However, for the next two decades she worked closely with Briggs on developing an improved personality type–based theory of human behavior.

When World War II broke out, there was some public discussion of using psychology to help assign draftees to appropriate military jobs. Myers was inspired by reading an article on this subject to work up the ideas that she had developed in cooperation with her mother into a practical self-description questionnaire for mass use.

This was the original version of what became the MBTI. It consisted of a collection of over 140 statements that the subject was asked to agree or disagree with as a self-description. The resulting types were presented in terms of four dichotomous pairs (in italics), along with single-letter mnemonic labels and explanatory glosses in parentheses:

1. Extraversion (E) – Introversion (I) (manner of obtaining energy)
2. Sensing (S) – Intuition (N) (mode of perceiving)
3. Thinking (T) – Feeling (F) (mode of judging)
4. Judging (J) – Perceiving (P) (orientation toward others)

Their questionnaire was not ready in time for use by the military during the war, but in 1945 Myers and Briggs were allowed to administer it to the students at George Washington University’s School of Medicine in Washington, DC.

The next landmark for the MBTI was reached in 1962, when it was officially adopted by the Educational Testing Service. Over the past 60 years, the MBTI has been adopted by more than 10,000 private businesses, 2,500 colleges and universities, and 200 government agencies in the US.

All in all, it is estimated that as many as 50 million people around the world have taken the MBTI, which has become what many call the “gold standard” of personality tests.

The test offered on the above-referenced website is expensive, costing $59.95. It consists of 143 self-description questions and took this reviewer about 15 minutes to complete.

However, the printed handout generated by the test was minimal (three pages). Moreover, it turns out that even this brief report could not be accessed until the test-taker worked through a second set of instructions and questions constituting a sort of interpretive “tutorial.”

This additional tutorial, for which there is no additional charge, is much lengthier than the original test itself, taking about an hour to complete. It functions like an extended advertisement, with multiple encouragements to buy written materials of a similar interpretive nature.

In any event, the final results were (once again) quite accurate.

In terms of the four dichotomous trait pairs listed above—which may combine to produce 16 possible personality types—the test reported that I am an “INTJ” (“Introversion, Intuition, Thinking, Judging”). This was very much in line with the other tests I had taken earlier.

Which is to say that the MBTI appears (to me, at least) to be about as reliable an instrument as any of the other tests.

For this reason, it is puzzling why the MBTI has been singled out for quite severe criticism—for example, in the corresponding Wikipedia article.

If it is justified to describe the MBTI as “pseudoscientific,” as this article does, then the same charge might be leveled with equal justice against all the most popular personality tests on the market today.

However, seeing that all the tests taken by this reviewer are in mostly good agreement regarding my most prominent personality traits, or my type, it is hard to understand how this could be a coincidence.

It seems to me that to achieve this level of uniformity of result, all these tests—including the MBTI—must be tapping into some genuine factors constituting my personality.

6. Gallup/CliftonStrengths Discovery

The concept of “strengths” characteristic of the Gallup/CliftonStrengths Discovery test is a somewhat different approach to personality theory. A form of what is known as “positive psychology,” strengths-theory places all of its emphasis on positive personality traits that one ought to concentrate on “strengthening,” as opposed to most tests, which posits both negative and positive traits.

The strengths idea derives from the word of the American psychologist Donald O. Clifton (1924–2003) at the University of Nebraska in the late 1940s.

Clifton was born in the village of Butte, Nebraska, and began his higher education at the state university in Lincoln, the state capital.

Clifton interrupted his education to serve in World War II. Upon returning home at the end of the war, Clifton finished his degree and stayed on at his alma mater to teach educational psychology.

In 1949, Clifton, together with William E. Hall (1916–1992) and other colleagues, founded the Nebraska Human Resources Research Foundation (NHRRF). The NHRRF served as both a psychology resource for the Lincoln community and as a laboratory for graduate students.

In his work with the NHRRF, Clifton observed the teaching techniques of graduate assistants to determine what distinguished the most talented instructors from the ordinary ones. He also researched the factors that contributed to the success of undergraduate students who graduated from those who did not.

Clifton’s findings in the research he conducted at the NHRRF lay at the foundation of his work on human personality. This work—which was basically Clifton’s version of personality psychology—became known subsequently as “strengths-based” psychology. This phrase was later disseminated widely, in such diverse fields as social work and business management.

(Note that some social workers claim their use the “strengths-based” approach came first. However, the chronologies involved appear to support Clifton’s priority.)

In 1969, Clifton resigned from his job at the University of Nebraska to work full-time on the development of the CliftonStrengths personality test. He did this initially under the auspices of a corporation he founded called the Selection Research, Inc. (SRI).

In 1988, Gallup, Inc. bought SRI. For this reason, the test has been officially known as the “Gallup/CliftonStrengths” test. In 1999, Gallup published a fully online version of the test for the first time.

Beginning in 2001, with the publication of Clifton’s book, Now, Discover Your Strengths, the word “Discovery” was officially added to the name of the test.

The CliftonStrengths test has been taken by nearly 33 million people.

The version of this test offered on the Gallup/CliftonStrengths Discovery website, to which a link is provided above, cost $64.94. It took this reviewer about 30 minutes to complete.

This questionnaire is structured somewhat differently from those appearing on similar sites. Instead of scoring each description on a scale from strong agreement to strong disagreement, here the test-taker is presented with pairs of contrasting sentences and asked to pick which is more accurate as a self-description.

Moreover, Gallup/CliftonStrengths is the only such test that is timed, with only 20 seconds allotted to each choice. I confess that I timed out on two of my selections.

Another interesting feature of the Gallup/CliftonStrengths Discovery approach is that the output does not return any numerical score, or percentage, at all. Instead, it posits 34 basic personality traits and types and lists ten of them in the order of their prominence within the test-taker’s character.

For example, I was told that I am, above all, a “Learner,” then that I am someone prone to “Intellection,” and so on, as follows:

1. Learner
2. Intellection
3. Input
4. Context
5. Achiever
6. Connectedness
7. Ideation
8. Relator
9. Focus
10. Strategic

Yet again, I must admit that the results fit me quite well.

The output provided by the Gallup/CliftonStrengths Discovery test is well-presented, with detailed discussions of each of one’s top-ten principal categories, and with a cursory presentation of the remaining 24 categories.

On the other hand, the level of the discussion in the output and on the website generally is not at the same intellectual level as is usual with such sites—I sometimes had the impression of being talked down to.

Finally, the site contains numerous proofreading errors.

7. CTS/Sales Profile

The CTS/Sales Profile test is the brainchild of Larry L. Craft (b. 1947).

Craft holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas in 1970, a master’s degree in psychology from the University of Houston in Texas in 1983, and a doctorate in education, with a specialization in leadership, from the University of Sarasota in Florida in 1995.

Craft started out in the financial services industry in the late 1960s. He later became an entrepreneur, founding Craft Systems, Inc., in 1978, a company which developed one of the first computerized employment tests during the early 1980s.

Craft’s initial foray into this field was primarily aimed at assisting managers in a business context to administer and score tests, and from the results to generate reports for the purpose of personnel assessment.

Among Craft’s many contributions to the field of personality psychology are the Craft Personality Questionnaire (CPQ), published in 2001. CPQ was basically a refinement of the Big-Five, or five-factor, model (see above).

In 2007, Craft released a new test, the CraftMetrics Personality Inventory (CMPI). Four years later, in 2011, he founded a new company, CraftMetrics Internationl (CMI), to develop the CMPI.

In the intervening years, the CMPI has become widely recognized for its usefulness in predicting job success and assessing team-member compatibility, as well as suitability for other organizational roles​​​​.

Craft also extended his scope to the world of consulting. Assessment methods he developed have been employed by major corporations such as Xerox, Hilton, Wells Fargo, Shell, MetLife, and Time Warner.

Altogether, CMI, and the CMPI produced by it, have been administered to more than one million employees and have helped to train in excess of ten thousand managers.

Recently, Craft published a book presenting his story and the fundamentals of his thinking to a wider audience: Hire the Best!: Motivate the Rest (2020).

Meanwhile, in 2008, Craft had sold his earlier test, CPQ, to a company called SalesManage Solutions. It is this company that developed Craft’s CPQ into the form of the CTS/Sales Profile (see above link).

The CTS/Sales Profile is fine-tuned for the assessment of potential high-activity sales personnel. It may also be used to assess members of existing teams and as an adjunct to their effective coaching and professional development.

There are several unique features to the CTS/Sales Profile website and test.

The site itself is highly polished and professional in appearance. On the other hand, it is not particularly user-friendly—this reviewer was obliged to phone their customer support team and have an employee walk me through the registration process.

The test costs $175—which makes it the priciest of the eight tests reviewed in this article. It took me an hour to complete, which also makes it the longest and most complex of the tests.

One section of the questionnaire consists of an old-fashioned IQ test, with logic and math questions. I found this a little strange, seeing that no other modern personality test incorporates an IQ component, nor is justification for it supplied anywhere on the site, so far as I could see.

I must admit that taking this part of the CTS/Sales Profile took me back to my youth, during the 1960s, when such tests were commonly administered to students in high schools, colleges, and universities. This was not an unalloyedly pleasant recollection!

The rest of the test consists of a variation on the usual form of a self-description questionnaire.

Namely, the test-taker is required to give two answers in response to each statement. One of these answers represents the description that the subject truly believes best describes him. The other one represents the description he believes an ideal employee ought to give.

As the foregoing implies, the orientation of the CTS/Sales Profile is directed throughout towards a business and teamwork setting, which sharply distinguishes it from the previous tests, which are all primarily geared towards personal growth or development.

The output generated by the test consists of two parts: a “Life Coaching Report” and a “Behavioral Style Report.” The former report presents the test-taker’s scores on each of the nine spectra representing the basic traits. Here are my results:

• Deadline Motivation – 95
• Recognition Drive – 42
• Assertiveness – 28
• Independent Spirit – 93
• Analytical – 95
• Compassion – 5
• Self-Promotion – 19
• Belief in Others – 67
• Optimism – 73

The “Life Coaching Report” interprets the meaning of each of these trait-spectra.

The other printout, the “Behavioral Style Report,” synthesizes the findings outlined in the first report and presents the result as a position in a “space” divided into four quadrants by twin axes representing “Ego Drive” (x-axis) and “Empathy” (y-axis).

The four quadrants generated by positive and negative scores along these two axes represent four personality types, termed “Dynamo” (upper left), “Performer” (upper right), “Diplomat” (lower right), and “Thinker” (lower left).

This reviewer’s personality was represented by a position almost dead center of the “Dynamo” quadrant.

On the whole, I found both the trait analyses and the synthetic personality type to fit me pretty well—as I had come to expect from such tests.

The primary selling point of this test is its explicit business-orientation. As such, it seems to me to work quite well.

8. Success Portraits Personality Test (SPPT)

The creators of the Success Portraits Personality Test (SPPT) are Fred S. Switzer III (b. 1953) and Jo Jorgensen (b. 1957).

Switzer obtained his bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1975 from the University of Texas at Austin, his master’s degree in industrial-organizational psychology in 1982 from Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, and his PhD in industrial-organizational psychology in 1988 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Right out of grad school, in 1988, Switzer was hired as a professor of psychology in the College of Behavioral, Social, and Health Sciences at Clemson University in Clemson, South Carolina.

Over the years, Switzer taught 20-odd courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels, including “Introduction to Statistics,” “Industrial Psychology,” “Personnel Psychology,” and “Selected Topics in Psychology of Judgment and Decision-Making.”

In 1998, Switzer, with three co-authors, published a ground-breaking article on the assessment of sales performance: “A Meta-Analytic Review of Predictors of Job Performance for Salespeople” (Journal of Applied Psychology, 83: 586–597).

Job performance is traditionally measured by either objective performance criteria (such as reaching targets) or subjective rating criteria (such as supervisor evaluation). It had long been assumed that the objective criteria were superior, due to the inherent unreliability of subjective evaluations.

However, Switzer and his co-authors found in their study of sales employees that objective sales performance evaluation criteria had a correlation of only four percent with general cognitive ability (a proxy for job performance), while performance evaluation by supervisors had a correlation of forty percent.

That is, it turned out—counterintuitively—that supervisors’ “subjective” evaluations were ten times more reliable than objective rating criteria with respect to general cognitive ability (and so as a predictor of job performance).

This study proved to be a landmark in several ways. For one thing, it launched a new line of inquiry into the use of general cognitive ability as a proxy for job performance. It was concluded that people with higher general cognitive ability learn more quickly and acquire more easily the knowledge they need to perform their jobs well.

The SPPT grew out of this important body of research.

After 36 years at Clemson, Switzer retired from teaching in 2024.

SPPT co-founder Jorgensen received her bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1979 from Baylor University in Waco, Texas, her MBA in 1980 from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and her PhD in industrial-organizational psychology in 2002 from Clemson University, where Switzer served as her dissertation adviser.

After taking her MBA, and before returning to graduate school for her PhD, Jorgensen worked in the corporate world as a marketing representative for IBM, where she worked with large computer systems. Jorgensen eventually left IBM to start her own company, which provided computer equipment to the accounting industry.

A little later, Jorgensen co-founded DigiTech, Inc., a software duplication firm which she ran for about ten years beginning in the 1990s. DigiTech, Inc., did about $2 million in business annually with companies such as AT&T and the NCR Corporation.

After selling DigiTech, Jorgensen embarked upon a career as a consultant, before deciding to return to graduate school to work for a PhD in industrial-organizational psychology.

After obtaining her PhD, Jorgensen joined the psychology faculty of Clemson University, as a colleague of Switzer, her former mentor. At Clemson, Jorgensen teaches a variety of ourses, including “Introduction to Psychology,” “Social Psychology,” and “Pursuing Happiness.”

In addition, Jorgensen has been politically active for many years as a member of the Libertarian Party, culminating in her nomination as the party’s candidate for President in the 2020 election, in which she obtained a little under two million votes.

Switzer and Jorgensen have developed the SPPT—which is debuting on this website in 2024—over a period of many years. In its present form, the SPPT is the result of extensive theoretical investigation and empirical research, including protracted trials with diverse groups of subjects.

The SPPT is a strikingly different type of personality assessment.

Like the CTS/Sales Profile, presented in the previous section, the SPPT is focused more on the test-taker’s suitability for his role in the commercial context in which he works than on his personal development as a human being—that is, as a social being, generally speaking.

But the SPPT takes this fundamental business orientation an important step farther and underscores the fact that personality traits and types manifest in different ways in different work scenarios.

What does this mean?

It means that the SPPT’s situational approach, together with its comprehensive range of traits, offers unique insight into how individuals adapt as a function of the varying positions they occupy and situations they encounter in their working lives.

More specifically, the SPPT measures the way an employee’s personality traits and types interact with the four main roles found in any commercial organization, namely, working . . .

• . . . on one’s own
• . . . as a team member
• . . . as a team leader
• . . . with one’s supervisor

Thus, the contextual understanding of personality the SPPT provides may empower management to make better hiring decisions, shape more effective teams, and foster leadership in ways that will positively impact the organization at all levels.

This contextual approach gives the SPPT a sounder empirical foundation than any of the other tests, in this reviewer’s opinion.

The SPPT costs $49.95. It takes about 25 minutes to complete.

This output is structured in 19 sections, representing Switzer and Jorgensen’s analysis of the 19 most-basic personality traits. Each of these sections, in turn, consists of four subsections representing the ways in which each trait in question interacts with the four work-roles just discussed.

The 19 fundamental personality traits posited by the SPPT (in italics) are the following (with explanatory glosses in parentheses):

1. Achievement Striving (highly motivated, desiring to excel at tasks and to outperform others)
2. Agreeableness (wanting to be liked, being warm, compassionate, and empathetic)
3. Assertiveness (desiring to present and defend one’s ideas to others)
4. Business Acumen (knowing one’s organization and industry)
5. Cautiousness (taking thought and care in confronting problems)
6. Cooperation (ability to work better by working with others)
7. Core Self-evaluation (having self-confidence, feeling capable of succeeding)
8. Creativity (being skillful in innovative thinking and problem-solving)
9. Dutifulness (being dependable and reliable)
10. Meta-leadership (understanding how one’s own leadership role fits into higher-level organizational structures)
11. Need for Autonomy (desiring to be able to act independently and take the initiative)
12. Need for Cognition (desiring information, being thoughtful)
13. Perseverance (desiring to do “whatever it takes” to succeed)
14. Self-regulation (self-restraint, having the tendency to apportion one’s actions to one’s goals)
15. Social Intelligence (being able to “read” other people’s emotions)
16. Team Orientation (being aware of the advantages of, and having a preference for, working in teams)
17. Tolerance for Ambiguity (being able to function with decisiveness even in the presence of uncertainty)
18. Trust (having the tendency to believe that others act largely in good faith and for the good of their organizations)
19. Vision (having the tendency to consider and work toward long-term goals)

The SPPT provides scores, or percentages, for each of these 19 basic personality traits.

For example, this reviewer scored highest in Dutifulness (83), Trust (80), Perseverance (77), Assertiveness (75), and Achievement Striving (73). Like the other personality tests discussed above, I have to admit that the SPPT pegs me pretty well as an individual.

However, where the SPPT differs markedly is by providing an analysis of the way that each of the test-taker’s personality traits interacts the four basic work-roles mentioned above.

Having worked in “cubicle hell” for many years earlier in my life, it was easy for this reviewer to relate to the business-orientation of the SPPT. On the other hand, I seldom worked as a team leader, so it was a bit more difficult for me to answer questions related to that specific work-role.

All the same, by using one’s observations of other people in their own work-roles—as well as one’s sympathetic imagination—I feel that anyone can usefully respond to the SPPT’s questions relating to any of the work-roles.

Nineteen traits multiplied by four work-roles would yield 76 distinct traits-in-relation-to-roles. However, 12 of the possible trait-role combinations are not relevant due to the nature of the trait or the role. That leaves 64 combinations. The printed output marches through them all conscientiously one by one.

I confess that the resulting, copious booklet does not lend itself to consecutive reading. If one attempted to read the whole thing straight through, the repetition inherent in its structure would inevitably produce a feeling of tedium.

But if one takes a more selective approach to reading the output—by confining one’s attention to one’s most-salient traits or else by focusing on one’s primary work-role in relation to each trait—then the fullness of the discussions provided by the printout can be very helpful.

Thus, used with discretion, the SPPT’s results may provide many useful insights, not only into the test-taker’s own character, but also into how his basic personality traits interact with those of his teammates, direct reports, and supervisor.